Rocky Mountain High

"I feel so clean." This from the seventh passenger crammed next to me in the back of a seven-passenger minivan. She continued, "I feel so healed. I feel so terrified."

We were high up in the Rocky Mountains--above the tree line where the air was clear albeit sparse. Moments before I had been kneeling with my face down low and my fingers palpating the ground so that my first experience with tundra could make as much sense as possible. Many visitors attempted to take in the mountains and elk by peering into 1 inch LCD screens on the back of digital media—not an easy task, I imagine.

I personally was not in need of healing prior to making the ascent, but I knew what the woman meant. The natural education we received was bone deep. It was enormous and powerful; severe and protective; indefinable.

Although I lack the ability to describe sufficiently what I perceived and thought, let me give some hazy impressions in contrast with some westward-expansion era art I saw while here in the Rockies. In these two-hundred-year old paintings of the west--Rockies included--the land is always very prominent, imposing, and majestic. People in the paintings are small and insignificant, often lacking much detail. That is how it feels to crawl across these landscapes. They are so massive--more than any picture can relate--and it is difficult to feel big enough to claim any ownership of it. Also in the paintings--American Progress comes to mind--the west is portrayed under furious storm clouds. Usually there is a break in the storm depicted by a brilliant sun and blue sky bursting forth from the east as civilization blows in. That is not how it feels in the Rockies. On the contrary (from my brief sampling,) l know the sky as clear and the air fresh. The storms of barbarity are clearly over the cities, developments, and subdivisions.

We made the descent in relative silence. On the ascent, everyone had talked about hobbies, movies, and work until someone had pointed out the beauty of the earth slipping past our windows at thirty miles per hour. Then we had scrambled and clawed to find adequate language to express the experience. The word "awesome" was uttered, but it seemed so inadequate. The more I think about it though, "awesome" is the right word. Perhaps we have raddled the word with misuse, but l think of the word the way Melville would have employed it...the way he did when he wrote, "this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath".

The conversation after the descent was different, quiet, humbled. The passengers talked of spouses and longings and the importance of compassion.

Healed? Cleaned? Perhaps to a degree. Me, I felt impressed--not only in an amazed sort of way, but in an impacted sort of way. The Rockies, it seems, pressed their shape into me a little. I'm sure if I had more time, that indelible mark would be a deeper and more affective dent in me than it is. I would like it to be.

--Thanks to Laura for the initial quotes and Mark (of Estes Park) for the art education